A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Horror Movies YouTube channel every other day during the week – but on Fridays things get even freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
This week’s Friday Fright Nights feature is basically a slasher movie, since it’s about someone knocking people off one-by-one in a place called Oldtown – which is also known as Hell Town. But directors Elizabeth Spear and Steve Balderson (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Page and Chris Pudlo) took a very unique approach to making this slasher. Hell Town is presented as if it originated as three episodes of a TV series where most of the episodes were lost in a studio fire. What has been unearthed and assembled for this movie are episodes 7, 8, and 9 of season 2. And these episodes make it clear that Hell Town was one hell of a goofy show, an over-the-top soap opera.
Spear, Balderson, and their collaborators had a lot of fun playing with the tone and clichés of soap operas for this satire, complete with melodrama, mid-season recasting, ridiculous dialogue, and exaggerated performances. They also put these “lost episodes” together in an interesting way, having incredibly prolific genre actress Debbie Rochon (who is closing in on 300 screen credits as of this writing) host the episodes – with the trailer for another Rochon project and a fake coffee commercial showing up between episodes in a way that’s reminiscent of the faux trailers showing up between movies in the Grindhouse double feature.
Hell Town has the following synopsis, which just reiterates information I’ve already given here: Scream Queen Debbie Rochon presents the melodramatic whodunnit horror romp Hell Town for a special feature-length presentation of Twisted Classic Television.
In addition to Rochon, the film stars Jennifer Grace, Pleasant Gehman, Amanda Deibert, Matt Weight, Casey Chapman, Chris Pudlo, Dané Shobe, Owen Lawless, Cara Hillstock, Krysten Day, Blake Cordell, BeckiJo Neill, Ben Windholz, Betti O, Kyle Eno, and Sarah Napier.
This is the only movie Spear and Balderson have directed together, but they both have multiple directing credits on their own. Balderson directed eight features and several documentaries before working on Hell Town, and this was the sixth feature for Spear. Hell Town marked Spear’s horror genre debut, but Balderson had made two horror movies before this one: Pep Squad and Watch Out.
If you’re a slasher fan with a taste for camp and a familiarity with soap operas, you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of watching this movie. So take a look at Hell Town – it’s free! – then let us know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below or on the YouTube page.
The movies that have previously been featured as the Free Movies of the Day can be found at THIS LINK, and also on the JoBlo Movies YouTube channel.
Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/friday-fright-nights-hell-town/
